Saturday, September 29, 2007

The ambiguity of Álvaro Colom's political programme is naturally complemented by his personal deficiencies of elocution.

This is his third tilt at the highest office in Guatemala; he has therefore built up a considerable debt to his backers, many of whom are noted for their shadiness. It is his last chance.

He also has a problematic wife. Sandra Torres Casanova was, according to rumours in circulation, the one time lover of Guerrilla commander 'Comandante Isaías' who spent most of the eighties holed up on the Tajmulcovolcano near San Marcos. She herself went by the name of 'Marta' then and regularly assisted the insurgents with logistics...and one noted kidnapping, it is said. Her personal circle, including her private secretary, still apparently fraternise rather intimately with the old guerrilla leadership, and Señora Colom is also said to have ties with exiled former President Jorge Antonio Serrano Elías.

She has been largely kept under wraps during the 2007 election, no doubt because Colom's opponents four years ago were able to successfully intimate that she had an undue influence over her husband.

Colom himself has consistently been the subject of 'black' rumours. That he drinks, that he is a closet Maya priest. His last campaign was derailed by allegations of corruption that he eventually managed to disprove, but many still suspect that his UNE party has connections with organised crime and the narcos.

Many middle-class voters don't want to have this mumbler representing their nation abroad.

Yet UNE's essentially centre-left positioning would in theory represent a significant change of direction in Guatemalan politics and Colom has a much better chance than Pérez Molina of forming an effective majority government in the congress (in which UNE is now the largest single group).

Friday, September 28, 2007

V rang me very early this morning with the news that her brother had just called her and chanted "Carlos Peña, Carlos Peña, Carlos Peñaaaaa". The nineteen-year old Guatemalan had just won Latin American Idol...and we'll probably never hear the end of it.

A few days before I left the country the evening news anchors were telling Guatemalans that it was their solemn national duty to vote for him in the semi-final. This was a few days after he had come home to visit some of his old haunts in the capital over the Independence Day weekend, thereby denying the concert given by Los Héroes del Silencio any real publicity.

Retired Brigadier General Otto Pérez Molina, whose campaign video shows that even Guatemala's right-wing reactionaries know how to mover el esqueleto, is in my view the man most likely to be elected as the country's next President − in spite of the fact that he trailed his opponent Álvaro Colom by around five percentage points at the conclusion of the first round.

This conviction of mine stems from my conversations with a number of middle-class voters, many of whom had supported Alejandro Giammattei (GANA) in round one. They have major reservations about Otto, but they simply can't stand Colom. If the General can proceed to grab most of the centrist vote, he'll convert his rival into a three-times loser.

Like the portrait photo on his campaign photo, the public face of Pérez Molina has been partially cast in shadow. His CV includes a two-year stint as head of Guatemala's notorious counter-insurgency unit G2 (from 1991-3) and the novelist Francisco Goldman has written a book called The Art of Political Murderwhich implicates him in the 1998 murder of Bishop Gerardi, which occurred two days after the cleric had published a report outlining the role of the military in civil war atrocities.

Though not to quite the same extent as Colom, there are also some serious questions about Pérez Molina's probity. What, some asked, happened to the funds deriving from cheques the general cashed at the end of the de León Carpio administration?

A recent article in the Prensa Libre suggested that Pérez Molina had made far superior use of modern media communications (especially the black arts of the Internet), whilst accusing him of showing "demasiadas ansias de poder" (Over keen-ness for power). Such is the nature of Guatemalan politics that even if Pérez Molina fails to win the Presidency on November 4, he is most likely to do so next time round (2011).

After the September 9 vote, the ads on Guatemalan TV returned to normal for a few days before a revised (and notably softened) version of the Mano Dura pitch started to run, considerably more 'Mano de Seda' than the vigorous fist punching evidenced in the clip below:

Wednesday, September 26, 2007

I bought myself a great new toy today: a Logik Internet Radio. It uses my wi-fi at home to connect to the Reciva database of thousands of radio stations that stream their content online around the globe. At present there are 17 listed cadenas in Guate for example.

A secondary talent of this gadget is its ability to stream mp3 files from my laptop's iTunes library when it sits on my wireless network. It was very easy to set up: plug and play really.

Last night I was amusing myself to listening into Tex-Mex broadcasts such as The Ranch and Hacienda Radio, before switching to the more refined output of Onda Madrid, "not just jazz, but the margins of music." And then I switched to Reggaeton Radio.

As well as being surprisingly well-briefed on the complexities of Guatemalan politics, our nine-year-old niece Amy can also, perhaps more worryingly, recite most of Calle 13's lyrics.

This song by Bebe has been steadily growing on my over the past few months. When I got to Guate I discovered that V also loves it. (The video reminds me a bit of the Bill Viola works that have been on display at the Tate Modern.)

Beaten into third place in round one, GANA's Alejandro Giamattei gloomily characterised the decision facing Guatemalans in the second round of their Presidential election on November 4 as "like choosing between two terminal illnesses." It now seems however that he would prefer to die by Mano Dura than by Lengua Trabada.Giamattei's problem as far as I could tell, is that he was just less cuddly than previous winners from the oligarchic centre, such as Berger and Arzú, both men with the demeanor of naughty but forgiveable uncles. He did however carry the capital convincingly on September 9 and Guatemala City's sizeable electorate may yet have the defining say on which of the two remaining candidates will ultimately don the Presidente's sash.

The present election will certainly not affect the most significant unbroken trend in Guatemalan politics in the era of renewed democracy: that each new elected head of state has belonged to a different political party. It has however already broken the more recent pattern of run-offs between populists and oligarchs. Indeed, if anything, the confrontation of Colom and Pérez Molina represents a throwback to the the old military v guerrilla polarity. Over the next couple of days I hope to post profiles of these two men and the personal baggage they bring to their campaigns.

Tuesday, September 25, 2007

This was the moment, around 9:45 pm on September the 9th, that Victor Hugo del Pozo, twice previously elected as mayor of La Antigua, emotionally conceded defeat in front of his friends, family and assorted empadronados gathered in the Sevilla Spanish School ; though at this stage it was still unclear who had come out on top on the night.

To the surprise (and discontent) of many, the winner turnd out to be Dr Rodolfo Vivar whose brother owns Toreros, one of the more notorious nightspots in La Antigua, located behind the market. One of the lamer arguments deployed by Dr Vivar's opponents was that the UNE candidate planned to open up discos all over the city as soon as he was elected, thereby leading its youth to inevitable perdition!

In the days immediately after the election V and I started to suspect that the shock of Vivar's election had caused an immediate increase in the incidence of death by miocardial infarction in the more well-to-do neighbourhoods, because many of the homes we passed as we walked our dogs were adorned with the black (bin-liner) bows of luto. Yet when V made her enquiries with a security guard outside one such house-in-mourning, she was told that it was in fact the institution of local government in La Antigua whose sudden passing was being thus lamented.

Our nine-year-old niece and goddaughter Amy is wonderously well-informed about local political affairs. She came to stay with us for four days shortly after the election; I found her waiting outside the front door one afternoon bearing her mochilita and a highly unusual three-headed pineapple. She duly informed us that grief-stricken supporters of "la Sucia Asensio" were driving around La Antigua dressed in black carrying lit candles and that her own aspirational eldest cousin Jeannettehad participated in one of these vigils, along with a bunch of "ricos".

The architect Susanna Asensio had lost out to Dr Vivar by just 220 votes and naturally felt hard done by. Her assumption of fraud was based on a familiar argument: Vivar, her supporters said, had bused in people from outside to vote for him. From my own observations of the electoral process this appeared somewhat unlikely, as every voting table was being closely observed by fiscales from the different parties, and the whole process appeared to be being managed fairly transparently, in La Antigua at least.

However, it emerged that Asensio had managed to win 60% of the tables, and until the votes at the Centro César Brañas were counted, had established a lead of 950 over Vivar. And this polling station was the one especially set up by the electoral commission to handle 'new' citizens: individuals from outside communities like El Rodeo and Escuintla who had supposedly moved to La Antigua quite recently, and as a result had applied for new personal identifcation documents (cédulas).

Outgoing mayor Antonio Siliézar ('el alcalde amigo...de lo ajeno') is accused of having effectively purchased 500 cédulas in the eight months prior to the vote, and overall the electorate of La Antigua seems to have been bumped up rather suspiciously by 10% in this same period. Fiscales at the César Brañas centre vouched that they witnessed lorry-loads of gormless yokels all trying to pass themselves off as residents of San Pedro las Huertas, and the finger of suspicion in organising this sudden migration is being pointed at dodgy old Siliézar, who appears to have sided with his rival when it became clear that his own politcal game was up. Two days before the vote a number of uniformed local policemen were caught handing out pamphlets designed to spread highly unfavourable rumours about Asensio and her campaign.

The TSE has nevertheless upheld the election of UNE's Dr Vivar. Meanwhile, the actions of Asensio's camp have caused consternation in some quarters. That their black-clad corteges were circling the parque on Independence Day in the wake of the college bands was deemed inappropriate by many, and Amy's sister Clara Lucia told us that she had heard people calling up local radio stations to say that they were glad that Vivar had won, even though they had themselves voted for Asensio. Some went on to suggest that Asensio's party, Antigua Somos Todos, had paid them for their vote.

Voter rewards of one kind or another are nevertheless all too commonplace. One of our close neighbours suddenly changed all the posters on the facade of her home in the days before the election, reportedly on the promise of a secretarial job with a new UNE adminsitration. Victor Hugo's features lay torn and mud-trampled on the road outside.

When we reached the Sevilla school (owned by one of del Pozo's key backers) at around 8pm on election night, it was filled with a mangy crowd of affiliates who clearly already sensed that they were not to get their hueso ('bone') this time round. My young and informed sources tell me that many had been promised land plots in return for their X.

Defeat was bitter to Victor Hugo, never before anything but a ganador. His theory that he could re-take the Ayuntamiento with just 3000 votes had been shown up conclusively. But the planned celebratory disco still went ahead, and a stack of particularly explosive, car-alarm unfriendly fireworks were launched into the night skies.

V and I had an invite to see a pre-release screening of this movie a year or so ago, but we ended up missing it for reasons that made for a memorable evening.

Now I get to see it speeding away from Guate on a TACA jet, occasionally finding the flashes of lightning outside the window more interesting than the action on the little screen overhead.

There have been a number of superior movies, several penned by Charlie Kaufmann for instance, in this ilk. The laugh-a-minute metaphysics of Groundhog Day also pops into mind. And none of them, thankfully, had Emma Thompson in them.

It's a story about a tax inspector who wants to be a guitarist apparently written by a tax inspector who wants to be a postmodernist. The sort of fiction I generally read is stranger...and better.

Monday, September 24, 2007

I have had to temporarily remove the blog posts that I wrote in Guatemala due to a curious IE-only formatting bug that I could not eliminate any other way. No matter, I will include the texts of these posts within my forthcoming pieces on the election and other matters Chapinescos.